Diario de Ferrol (Spain): Condemned for Practising Falun Gong

This oriental art of relaxation is being persecuted by the Chinese Government.

During a professional Finnish model’s visit to Ferrol as the international representative for a cosmetic brand, she took the opportunity to raise awareness about the situation of over seventy million Chinese people that are being persecuted in their country for practising a discipline similar to yoga.

Three words summarise the philosophy of Falun Gong: Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance, principles that in some way synthesise the conceptual aspect of similar practices such as yoga, for example. Falun Gong, a practice that surged in China and started to become popular in the country in 1992 thanks to Master Li Hongzhi, who publicised one of the various self-cultivation disciplines of mind and body which just a few years ago started to come from the Orient and which is generically grouped under the name of qigong.

Something so healthy and inoffensive, established already in more than seventy countries around the world, was all of a sudden prohibited from one day to the next almost six years ago by the Chinese Government, then presided over by Jiang Zemin. The reasons for this persecution, according to the organisations that defend this large collective, point to the harsh control that the dictatorship exerts over everything that does not follow the regime’s principles. In barely six years, the number of people murdered, tortured to death, persecuted and incarcerated has not ceased to grow, a circumstance that has led the NGO Global Mission to Rescue Persecuted Falun Gong Practitioners to defend and call out for the rights of so many Chinese people.

One of its members is the ex-model Pia-Maria I. Sandas, an international representative of a cosmetic label, who in her visit to Ferrol also took the opportunity to make known the situation that these people are in, included among which is one of her good friends, Jane Dai, seen here in the photo, whose husband was murdered for committing the “terrible crime” of simply practising an art that relaxes the body and mind.